In his address to the reader he says, ‘I should not have proposed, most learned reader, to take on my weak shoulders this weighty and so much disputed province of the healing art, had I not felt me forced, against my will as it were, to lend my aid in furthering medical studies by a fair defence of Galenical doctrine, and more especially still by my love of truth.... I think it will be found that I have conciliated Galen so far with my own views as to dispel any doubts I may have had of a favourable award, if I have only an equitable judge in my reader. Of this, at all events, I feel well assured that no studious person who carefully weighs what is here set forth will repent him of his reading.’ This is not amiss from a Doctor of a year’s standing! But it is in his Preface to the work that Michael Villanovanus, as we apprehend him, comes still more particularly before us. Aware, as he says, of the fate that so often befals the meddler in a quarrel not his own, and displaying a commendable amount of caution, not without a spice of mock modesty, our author is here considerate enough to tell us that ‘he does not intend to offer himself as censor in the controversy, between the Galenists and Averrhoists, and by finding something to object to in the conclusions of each, to have them both fall foul of him as an enemy;’ after which he proceeds, characteristically still, to say, ‘but that I may not withhold from others that which I possess myself and gratefully acknowledge, which may be of use to my fellow men, I throw aside fear and proclaim what I believe to be the truth.’ The ‘Syruporum Universa Ratio,’ or general Rationale of Syrups, is in truth a very learned little book, extremely well written; much of it, as becomes the young practitioner, having reference to the writings of predecessors of the highest authority in medical science. Hippocrates and Galen, above all others, are freely quoted, and their views discussed, for Servetus was ‘nothing if not critical,’ and a variorum reading or two to show his scholarship is proposed. But he also refers to Avicenna, not thinking it amiss to learn of the enemy, and to Paul of Aegina, Monardus and others, by which he proclaims the extent of his reading, and his readiness to imbibe knowledge at every source.